In Ancient Egypt, people often associated Anubis with jackals, due to their penchant for scavenging the meat of corpses in the graveyards, so John made our Anubis look much more like a jackal than most representations of the god, with much more fur than the smooth obsidian look he is often portrayed with.

I’m a bit of a Corgi fan and noticed that they kind of look like shorter, cuter Jackals. It’s a nice contrast from his god form being much bigger than a normal human to him having short, stubby legs in dog form.

– John Barry Ballaran

We did not have to change much from the very first pieces of concept art for Anubis.

The most important change was the addition of great big bushy eyebrows!

Eyebrows on a dog may be unrealistic, but we decided to value expression over realism.

Since ‘Doctor Who’ is owned by the BBC, and Titan Comics owns the rights to distribute comics based on the property, our only chance for financial support to pay for John’s work would be to send in the script and art samples to Titan Comics, and hope they would be willing to pick us up for a few stories.

I was pretty naive to think that they would be interested, as I am sure countless well-established writers would give their left hand to be able to write for anything ‘Doctor Who’ related.

They never got back to us, but that did not come as a very big surprise to me, and even before I had sent in the script I had been thinking about other possible stories me and John could bring to life together.

When I first had the idea of a version of Anubis trapped inside the body of a purse dog, it had actually been as a villain for one of my ‘Doctor Who’ stories.

But even before I knew for sure that I would not be able to make those comics, I decided that character was too good to merely be an antagonist in another character’s story.

I knew Anubis The Dog deserved to have his story told, so it was to him I turned next.

Starting a series about original characters is much harder than relying on an established brand, but it also leaves me more freedom.

But who knows, maybe if ‘Anubis: Dog of Death’ gets really popular I’ll get a better chance to write about my favorite timelord.